Analyzing the Role of Community and Individual Factors in LAMP Grant Funding: Identifying Diverse Barriers Across Clustered US Counties
FAS Food Systems Impact Fellowship Capstone Project, April 2024
Introduction
Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP)
The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) administers a variety of grant programs aimed at strengthening local and regional food systems. The Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP) is one such program that supports direct producer-to-consumer marketing, food enterprises, and value-added agricultural products. Established under the 2018 Farm Bill, LAMP fosters community collaboration and public-private partnerships to improve regional food economies, aiding in the development of business strategies and infrastructure for local food systems. The Farm Bill provided LAMP $50 million per year in mandatory funding and the programs received significant supplemental funding through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 and the American Rescue Plan of 2021.1 The major grant programs within LAMP include the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP), Regional Food Systems Partnership (RFSP), and the Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP).
Building community capital through food systems investment
Allocating grant funding
The goals of the LAMP program include: (1) simplify the application processes and the reporting processes for the Program; (2) improve income and economic opportunities for producers and food businesses through job creation; and (3) strengthen capacity and regional food system development through community collaboration and expansion of mid-tier value chains.2
Each program within LAMP includes a set of constraints intended to improve the allocation of resources to specific program activity areas.
In 2021, AMS partnered with Florida A&M University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore on a project focusing on the following goals3:
Evaluate barriers to AMS grant opportunities for socially disadvantaged communities
Invest in building trust and confidence between these communities and the USDA
Take action to rectify inequalities in program access through targeted outreach, training, and technical assistance.
The results of this work are intended to be used to improve access and reduce barriers for all applicants, presumably part of the agency’s renewed efforts to address USDA’s history of systemic discrimination.4
Community preparedness
Recent research suggests that the success of food system interventions, policies, and strategies for local economic development may hinge on the preexisting levels of community capital.5
Additional research showed positive associations between cultural and social capital and farm to school activity.6
Much of this research highlights community assets that are often overlooked in community development work.7
Objective
This report intends to lay the groundwork for an analytic approach that helps determine which community characteristics are associated with LAMP grant funding allocation. This could help determine if there is something akin to a “threshold of community preparedness” the unknowingly results in certain low-resource communities being excluded from LAMP programming. If so, the results of this research could provide insight into the particular characteristics associated with LAMP access, which could help agency staff to better allocate resources to ensure equitable access to grant funds.
Methods
Data access and aggregation
As a first step, a variety of data sets were obtained, cleaned, organized, and used for general data exploration. Information on specific datasets and sources can be found below. All work was done using the open source statistical software R version 4.4.0.8
LAMP grant data
Information on LAMP awards came from the LAMP Navigator website, where AMS has made this information publicly available, along with a dashboard for sorting, filtering, and visualizing the grant information.9
LAMP grant award amounts, 2006 - 2023
Community characteristics
Participation in grant programs supporting investment in local food systems, such as LAMP, is influenced by a variety of socioeconomic and environmental factors that influence local needs, as well as local capacity to apply for grants and manage funded projects. Community wealth, which encompasses social capital, natural capital, financial capital, and a variety of other forms of wealth impacts the ability to engage and participate in such programs.10 Moreover, things like poverty and food insecurity rates have been shown to exacerbate vulnerabilities and influence accessibility and participation in programs.11 With food systems-focused programs such as LAMP, urbanization and proximity to agricultural land can influence market dynamics and food system connectivity.12
This report will assess the relationship of each of these community characteristics to the distribution of LAMP grants across the US.
Indicators of community wealth
Population drivers
Farmland proportion
Underserved classification
(Caveats and such)
Temporal component -
Does not include data on who applied, in addition to who was funded.